Louise Penny: All the Devils are here, 9780751579277, C format Export Paperback, Sphere

 

Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache crime series, all  set in the village of Three Pines in Canada’s Quebec countryside , was a recommendation of my friend  Neva several years ago and I have never looked back…  I am hooked now and have passed on the Gamache virus to several friends. To quote the Washington Post:  The series is deep and grand and altogether extraordinary”;  this sums it up pretty well. 

It is always difficult to talk about crime fiction without giving away too much of the plot as is the case with  Louise Penny’s latest  “All the devils are here”,  in my view her best to date even if it does not take place in Canada but solely in Paris.  Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache are visiting their children, Annie and Daniel who both have moved to Paris with their families, as Annie is about to give birth to her second child. 

When Stephen Horowitz, a self-made billionaire who is Armand’s godfather and the man who raised him after his parents died tragically, is deliberately attacked and run over by a truck after a family dinner with both of them witnessing the murder attempt , Armand is determined to find out why someone wants Stephen  dead who is barely alive after the attack falling into a coma. Things get even stranger when Armand and Reine-Marie head for Stephen’s apartment and discover the body of a man in the living room.  As Gamache starts to investigate with the French police not being too amused about his involvement,  secrets his godfather  hid from him over the years surface. As Armand starts to question the man Stephen really is, he becomes dangerously entangled in a spider web of lies and deceit endangering both him and his family.  I will not reveal  anything more  … had a great few days curling up in my new armchair and submerging myself in this terrific book.  Thank you Louise Penny, 5 stars from moi!

 

Selina Hastings:  Sybille Bedford – An Appetite for Life, Chatto & Windus, London,  (Penguin Random House Group) , 9781784741136, hardback, pub date: November 2020

I came across Sybille Bedford as an author during my time at Penguin and devoured her autobiographical last book “Quicksands”. What an unusual woman and what an extraordinary life.   Drawn very much to nonfiction and biographies at the moment, I was very happy to see Selina Hasting’s “Sybille Bedford – An Appetite for Life” announced to be published in November and lucky enough to read an early proof. Selina Hastings has written an incredibly thorough and objective account of Sybille Bedford’s fascinating cosmopolitan life.

Born in 1911 in Germany of aristocratic half-Jewish parents  who had a disastrous marriage, she spent her turbulent childhood in Germany but lived the majority of her adult life like a vagabond between France, England, Italy and the WWII years in the USA and some time in Mexico.  Her relationship with her promiscuous mother Lisa was  a very difficult one at best with her half sister Katzi often providing much needed support in her early years. Bedford  always knew she wanted to be a writer soon travelling in prominent intellectual circle although it took years before she took pen to paper.  Being openly Lesbian with some bisexual affairs, she had an incredible sexual appetite up into old age falling in and out of love constantly, often affairs turning into lifelong friendships with former lovers providing financial support when she was hard up. Her most famous entanglement was with Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria who became mentors and lifelong friends arranging a “bugger marriage” to a Mr. Bedford in England enabling her to become a British subject during a time of political upheaval in Europe when her assets were frozen in Germany. 

Bedford’s social and intellectual life was extraordinary and reads like a European who is who of writers and artists. What astonished me the most was how readily everyone put up friends for months, sometimes years in their houses offering financial and emotional support if needed affording Sybille Bedford her restless life style moving from country to country without a home base for many years.  She was a terrific wine and food connoisseur but also a terrible snob looking down on people who did not meet her intellectual expectations or background, selfishly demanding her lovers to support her eccentric lifestyle disregarding their needs.  

 I became very irritated with her behavior several times during the read but this is a fascinating biography of an unusual woman who was not a feminist and lived up to  95 despite the large amounts of food and drink she had consumed in her life.
But it is also a historical document of a century and an incomprehensible life style that has completely disappeared.

Craig Johnson: Next to Last Stand, A Longmire Novel, 9780525522539, hardback, Viking US (Penguin Random House) 

In times when long distance travels hold very little attraction, an armchair trip to Wyoming countryside and Sheriff Walt Longmire’s turf is a welcome distraction  during the last days of summer . I have been a huge fan of Craig Johnson’s Longmire series for some time. 

In his latest novel “Next to Last Stand” the historical battle of Custer’s Last Stand plays a prime role but this time as a motive in a very valuable painting which was destroyed in a fire and was never seen again. When Walt is called to the Veteran’s Home of Soldiers and Sailors to look into Charlie Lee Stillwater’s sudden death of an apparent heart attack, they discover in his room a partial painting and a Florsheim shoe box filled with dollar bills amounting to one million dollars. How on earth did Charlie come into possession of so much money while disabled and living in a retirement home for Vietnam vets?

 

Walt does what he does best: investigating the trail of the money and the history of the mysterious painting taking the reader with him into the workings of the Absaroka Sheriff Department in the beautiful Wyoming countryside. “Next to Last Stand” I found a less fast paced and violent novel compared to other Longmire books but this made it particularly fascinating due to the  unfamiliar subject matter in comparison to Longmire’s usual type of investigations this time unveiling the dealings of the corrupt art world; I had a great time reading “Next to Last Stand”.